In the immortal words of Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I strongly approve of "outing" CIA agents and if that's what Karl Rove or Scooter Libby did, well, hell, I'll move 'em up a notch in the Inferno on the strength of it -- maybe hip-deep in the boiling pitch instead of nipple-deep. But what nobody should ever forgive is the Times allowing itself to be used as a conduit for glaringly obvious neocon disinformation, which is just what Judith Miller has been doing for the last few years whenever she's out of jail.
The Times' feeble claim that they were fooled is exceptionally unconvincing. Whatever you may think about these folks, they're not naive -- well, Friedman of course, but he's sui generis. They must have known on 43d Street, right up the chain of command, that Miller was feeding them pure, unadulterated sludge from the Wolfowitz/Bolton/Feith sewage plant. And yet they kept printing her stuff, and they amazingly went balls-to-the-wall to depict her as some kind of freedom-of-the-press martyr when she took her little retreat on the inside.
Reading between the lines of the Times' highly embarrassed hanging out of all this in-house dirty laundry, it seems clear that Miller had protection all the way from the top -- all the way from little Pinch Sulzberger, in fact.
So... Do Ariel Sharon's pilotless drones know something about Pinch that the rest of us would really like to know? Or is Pinch a crypto-Likudnik himself? There's a story to be told here, and I just hope I live to read it someday.
YES BUT TO THIS PARTICULAR NEO-COM
JUDY IS VERY EYE CATCHING
ALL THE SAME